


Our greatest glory is not in never falling--

by sprx77



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Genre: Character Death Fix, Don't blame me blame George Lucas, Fix-It of Sorts, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Diad, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Han Solo, Force Ghost Leia Organa, Force Ghost Luke Skywalker, Gray Jedi, Gray Jedi Kylo Ren, Gray Jedi Rey (Star Wars), I hate that that's a tag but here we are, I swear on my life, I would not myself click on a fic with these tags, It's actually a fix it fic for ship, Kylo Ren Redemption, Life advice from Anakin Skywalker, Multi, Seriously ignore all tags, That's it, The Force, They're actually Sense8 style Force twins in true 'accidental twin kiss' style, This is the movie but with cpr and no kiss, YOOO this is not ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22048687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: --but in rising every time we fall.Rey’s eyes are unseeing, but so had a young apprentice’s been after drowning in the temple’s lake. Then like now someone had pressed their chest until ribs yielded, until a heart beat, until air came in and out in a way that had nothing and everything to do with the Force, entirely human, entirelylife.“You Skywalkers,” Dad said, and distantly Ben noted that it was a thousand times more validating than Palpatine’s monstrous affirmation as he pushed Ben off the cliff, “Always so quick to use that magic when two good hands will do.”(AKA: be the "CPR trumps Sith Magic" fic you want to see in the world)
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 7
Kudos: 116





	Our greatest glory is not in never falling--

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who just watched Rise of Skywalker? It is me.
> 
> I wanted to hate it, but I genuinely enjoyed it. It's probably one of the best movies I've ever seen, which of course makes me furious. I was so prepared to hate it. But cinematically it was gorgeous and the plot had so few plot holes that I couldn't even be mad.
> 
> I immediately wrote this as a reaction piece because it was all I could think of in the theatre (spoilers, obviously, for the end scenes); a) that if he had used CPR we wouldn't have that romeo and juliet bullshit-- specifically Leia coming in like "my god I have birthed an idiot, the force isn't the be-all-end-all" and b) WHAT DO YOU MEAN, PALPATINE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE HASN'T BEEN A DIAD IN GENERATIONS? First of all they took the bond way too far trying to make it a (het) soulmate thing, and my soul physically left my body when they kissed instead of going for a pacific rim head touch, but tbh it WORKED (I'm pissed) especially if you look at it as a 'emotionally charged scenario full of relief and also Emotions' and not, like, a declaration of love.

A hand stills his, shaking over Rey’s midriff.

“That’s a Sith technique, you know.” His uncle’s voice says, and Kylo—Ben—can’t handle it. Everything he knows has been shaken to the core, beliefs ripped up at the roots and scattered like the forests of Takodana.

Everything is jumbled, destroyed; nothing has ever been more clear.

The purpose that guided him, the clarity of the last few hours; it all ended back to back with her, the Force a strong and beautiful _light_ in him, all doubt cast aside.

The Force was silent when he crawled over to her, a muted shadow where it had been a bonfire.

His outline is blurred, the edges torn. As when Palpatine sucked the life from both of them, something has been severed, ragged; energy, missing; _her_ , gone.

“I can’t be without her.” His voice shakes. He feels oddly like laughter. A righteous wind had buoyed him, nothing clearer, and without it—without her—the world is dim. Perhaps that’s the bloodloss. He is so sure he pulled himself up a cliff, from death’s edge, to trade the embers of his life for her’s.

He was going to bleed out soon, here in this craven Sith graveyard. If he was dying anyway, for what reason should he _not_?

So what if it was a Sith technique? He’d grappled with the choice— _the_ choice—for so long, latched on to her introduction and disruption of his path like he’d been _waiting_ for it, obsessed with her and trying to deny the why of it. She was change, an opportunity to choose again.

Why enter in a gamble of _will I win or will you win_ , if he wasn’t willing to lose? He could have pulled her into the dark-- except for how he never could, footing too shaky to stand sure on his own much less pull anyone over.

He’d shoved everything into their game, put every card on her light on the other side of the tunnel, and damned if he had a plan for _after_.

He just wanted it to be over.

If it was over, he wouldn’t have to choose anything. No disappointments, no struggles, no emotions tearing him up inside.

He’d never imagined it could end this way; redemption was never in the cards for him.

Until it was.

The perfect ending, all rights wronged. A Sith technique saving the last Jedi. The wayward son coming home. She’d open her eyes, _see_ him, forgive him; call him Ben and he’d pay the price, absolved of _all of it_.

He closed his eyes, drawing energy from wherever he could find it. The feeling of Luke’s hand on his faded.

“Oh, kid.” His _dad_ ’ _s_ voice said, and suddenly there was a solid hand on his shoulder. A hurt noise pulled involuntary from his aching chest. Not a memory, this time. Blue ringed and _real_ in the Force.

“That’s not how redemption works.” _Grandfather_ ’s face shimmered into being, beside him. So much and so little; a tide of emotions in the bare breaths between decision and interference. “You have to be alive, Ben. You don’t just die a hero. You _live_ and spend the rest of your life making up for the lives you’ve taken.”

“How?” He croaked, barely able to think around the wrongness of it. All his life he’d been part of a yin-yang-both and now he was empty, stripped away of half of—something. Force, spirit, soul.

“With me, now.” Two wrinkled hands take his.

 _“Mom._ ” Ben chokes. At some point he would start sobbing; it had already started behind his ribs, where the broken pieces jabbed at organs and made it hard to breathe.

“With me,” She repeats, shining and immortal within the Force.

Rey’s eyes are wide open and unseeing, a sight he wouldn’t have thought he could stomach. But it was easy, here, to see her. To take it. Without the ghosts, he had been ready to feed her his life until she breathed again, had put one bloody hand in front of another up the cliff without really feeling it—feeling every inch of tortured skin, every broken bone—and the Force had been so strong, so alive, cracked into his skull like—like—he could see every blow and expression, every moment of the fight above, the universe laid bare in those moments with energy flying around, across, and through the air as well as their bond.

Now those bleeding fingers find hard sternum and someone—he can’t see who—has Rey out of his arms and on the ground, as his _mom’s_ palms settle over him, working with the timing. She counts for him, tells him to breathe—for him and for her, his own lungs trying to hyperventilate, hers struggling to inflate.

Rey’s eyes are unseeing, but so had a young apprentice’s been after drowning in the temple’s lake. Then like now someone had pressed their chest until ribs yielded, until a heart beat, until air came in and out in a way that had nothing and everything to do with the Force, entirely human, entirely _life_.

“You Skywalkers,” Dad said, and distantly Ben noted that it was a thousand times more validating than Palpatine’s monstrous affirmation as he pushed Ben off the cliff, “Always so quick to use that magic when two good hands will do.”

“That magic saved your life,” Anakin, young and wry, said. “Piloting skills, shooting without aiming—even now a Ghost in the Force. You were as Force-sensitive as any of us.”

“I don’t want to hear jack from _you_ —”

“Must we?” Asked uncle Luke. For Rey he had appeared the old and venerable teacher, but here he was as young as his father, a Jedi Master in the prime of his youth. The teacher that had closed Ben’s fingers around his first light sabre. “Even now I’m the one to…”

Ben heard all of this from a distance, flowing in one ear and out the other. He couldn’t pay attention to it; he couldn’t _not_ listen, either, voices he’d wanted to hear for so long striking like whips to his heart.

“You’re doing so well,” Mom said, and he had to close his eyes to fight the blur of it. Surely he was dying and this was his death bed, somehow granted the one final blessing of his _family_ saying goodbye.

Ben gasped in air, struggling past broken ribs and punctured lungs, and breathed it into Rey’s lungs. The heart under his aching wrists fought back; impossibly, faintly, and his hands fell away faint with surprise.

She didn’t gasp. There was no coughing or sputtering as when a drowned child forced water from their lungs. He hadn’t given up his life force to do it but here she breathed, all on her own, and still his limbs ached from the lack of energy.

He couldn’t move. He dropped his sweaty and bleeding forehead to her sweaty and bleeding forehead and wanted so badly to verbalize the apology that squirmed in his stomach; not quite the same apology that had been aching there for too many long years, but close to it.

It felt like there was no room for apology in the Force bond that burned between them; a fleet of ships to the rescue exiting hyperspeed, appearing out of nowhere, hope erupting in the breasts of the Rebellion; a star, exploding into existence; the Force, triumphant inside him as he cast a dark sabre into the Death Star’s watery grave.

Her hand grasped his. The ghosts were gone, his mother’s final kiss to his forehead lingering. She sat up and he was moved, probably, but the dark had crept in to his vision. It was the oddest thing, dying; the Force bond was there, strong and unflinching--the unwavering righteousness of sharing sabres and visions and moving as one—yet he was slipping. Falling.

Rey’s eyes were bright with life and he was crying, staring back, so sure it was the last thing he’d ever see. Her hands cupped his face, stronger by the second.

He was so fucking _relieved_.

He woke up.

It was… _entirely_ unexpected.

He blinked at the off-yellow ceiling and the chattering of medical droids in the distance. Almost reflexively, he reached _inside_ and, more like looking into a mirror than finding the end of the tether, saw her.

She was so close it _ricocheted_ and he fell out of the connection, head spinning. He tried to touch his temple to sooth the blooming pain there and a calloused hand caught his wrist before he could jerk out the IV.

“Or you could just open your eyes.” Rey censured, rude and wry. She never pulled punches.

He looked over at the sound of her voice, stunned to see her.

Stunned to see _anything_.

“Don’t look so surprised, _Ben_.” A flood of grief almost choked him. Of course he’d throw aside _it’s too late to come back_ when both his parents were gone, when it didn’t _matter_ anymore.

(Even as he thought it, he knew it to be a lie. Of _course_ it mattered, it was the most meaningful thing he’d ever done, at just the right time.)

She continued, blithe; “You’re going to help me clean up this mess. You know they made me a General? Me!”

Grandfather’s words echoed in his ears; not the shell of the man he’d worshipped, but the blue-tinted apparition full of life and wisdom. _That’s not how redemption works. You live_ , he said. _You spend the rest of your life making up for the lives you’ve taken_.

But how? Where did he even _begin_ to balance the toll?

But.

Even he knew, he already had. When it mattered—truly mattered—he’d turned the tide. That, at least, he could be proud of.

It wasn’t enough—not nearly enough—but it was a stepping point.

Once, for so long and so very recently, he’d have been torn apart by the options, the right and wrong, the struggle between light and dark and choice and purpose.

No longer.

With startling ease, the weight of it vanished off his shoulders. He couldn’t torture himself with it.

Rey was still talking.

“—and we have to design the new Jedi curriculum but not, you know, _keep the bad parts_ —"

He could feel it. The balance. For so long they had been two dichotomous sides; the harsh light of the Jedi that allowed for no emotion and the putrid Sith shadow that drowned in it. Now they had taken _each other’s_ hands.

And, miraculously, met in the middle.

Now, though his eyes struggled to stay open—they had him hooked up to an IV drip _and_ some fairly incredible pain medication, which explained why he could breathe without screaming—she talked to him.

Like a person. Like an equal. She talked and talked and for the first time in _years_ he just listened.

 _We get to decide what the Jedi will be_ , she told him, and a vision spread out like the Force before them, new Jedi trained in a new way.

Not Luke’s doomed recreation of a flawed order, constantly seeking a fabled balance and finding none when they refused to bend, but something new, born of two Force users with no one to guide them, not really. They’d both seen the dark side, they’d both seen the light.

Rey, using a Sith’s power to heal life instead of taking it away. Rey, showing him lightning. A former storm trooper with a blue sabre, empathetic and defiant; an entire company of mutinous first order, come together with _this is wrong_ and, now, a whole future of figuring out what was _right_ , together, one step at a time; pilots and former Spice traders who thought they were too normal, too old, too separate from magical Skywalker destinies taught to trust in the feeling deep in their chests, the instinct and emotion that made them good at what they did. Droid mechanics, intuitively following the flow of life and sentience, learning the underlying current that guides their hand. Ship mechanics, so sure of the physics, the hope that keeps an old rig together, the synergy of new-old parts and trusted systems _flying_ through the black.

All over the Galaxy people rose to the Falcon’s call, threw off the First Order in one shining day.

 _There are more of us than there are of you_.

Ben Skywalker rose from the Dark like his grandfather before him, but he didn’t forget what he learned there. Rey Skywalker could have been his cousin, once, Luke’s child who escaped the Temple massacre; she could have been a nameless child of nameless Resistance, sensitive to the Force but the first of her name, as Anakin was once; she was a child of the dark like he was a child of the light, and it didn’t matter, because Rey looked across the room from him from within the arms of her Finn and her Poe and he felt awkward, out of place, _unsure_ for the first time he could remember.

He’d always been so sure.

At some point, he’d drifted off again, deep under the influence of pain medication. He woke several more times, often to Rey in the room, but the final time he opened his eyes she had the stormtrooper and the fighter pilot with her, hands tangled with easy grace.

They talked of the future each time, planning out the path of the Resistance and the Jedi and all the people touched by the machinations of an undead emperor.

The story of what happened beneath Exegol came out, stuttering and with many pauses for explanation, gaps filled, to various expressions of outcry, relief and disbelief. When they were done, Poe and Finn wrapped their arms around Rey like they’d just finished the battle all over again, in the celebration and jubilation that he’d missed in unconsciousness.

Their too-tight embrace turnednto laughter and even into jokes, here and there, about parentage and family, the kind of humor of dark subjects that only the closest can share without hurt. One particular jab struck Ben and he mulled it over, coming to a firm conclusion then and there.

“I am _never_ having children.” He said, into the healing room on the rebel base. “This nonsense dies with me.”

“About that.” Rey swung her arms around her boys and they let her, smiles and hugs and laughter. “I’m pretty sure your mom adopted me. I think I was always meant to be a Skywalker.”

Ben tried and failed to figure out how he felt about that. _Feelings_ were the hardest part about this.

“Mom and Uncle Luke were a diad in the force.” He finally said, defeated. “Do _you_ know how old you are?”

“What are they talking about?” Poe asked, _de sotto_ to Finn.

“I don’t know.” Finn stage-whispered back. “All this _Force_ stuff confuses me.”

“You _regularly use a lightsaber_.”

Rey ignored both of them, head tilted to the side in question. Her eyes widened.

“I’m so glad I didn’t kiss you.” She realized, and ignored the small mutiny that erupted on either side of her (“That was an _option?!” “Hey!”_ ).

“Hell, kid.” Luke rubbed the back of his neck, a blue ghost between them. “Wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”

“Happy Birthday, by the way.” Leia shimmered to existence with a motherly smile, somehow not out of place on her painfully young, blue face. “When we realized who you were, Rey, we found out when you were born. It was the same down to the _second_.”

Ben didn’t realize he was crying until hot liquid spilled down his cheeks.

He wasn’t sure if they were his tears or hers. He realized, as she did, that every time they were in a room together the Force connected them without effort, without struggle. From across the _Galaxy_ they could look into each other’s eyes.

Palpatine had claimed to be her only family; nearly lured her to the Dark by threatening the new one she’d forged with rebellion and hope. But even then he’d been fighting to get to her, so _sure_ it was where he needed to be, what he needed to be doing.

“We’re not, actually, related.” Rey assured a sputtering Finn, while Poe covered his entire face and groaned. Her thoughts said otherwise, glowing with satisfaction and a skin-deep contentment.

His mom and uncle smiled at him, a crushing feeling he couldn’t name thudding in his heart in response, and he ignored it as best he could to read their smiles. _We adopted her for you_ , they said with their expressions, smug as anything.

“I always wanted a sister.” He said, clumsy as anything. So long denying any family or history as Ben Skywalker made reaching into such simple childhood wants a difficult thing, but he did it easily, for the first time not flinching as he thought about who he used to be.

His grandfather sat at the foot of his bed, resting a hand on Ben’s leg that he could barely feel.

“Palpatine whispered to you all your life.” Anakin said, but his mouth didn’t move. Ben realized it was just for him, a whisper in the force. “It doesn’t excuse what you did—nothing will excuse what you did—but it _explains_ it. He targeted you, because you’re my grandson, because the Force moves in you. Because your first breath was with _hers_.”

“When I was climbing up that cliff.” He says, and his brain should have dulled the sense memory of peeling fingers climbing cold stone, but it was still vivid and raw. “I felt him die. It was… the first time it was quiet in my head. I hadn’t realized, until then, how he was talking to me. Always talking to me.”

“Palpatine—he—did terrible things with the Force.” Rey said, after the room plunged into quiet. “All the Sith were with him, a collection of terrible and _unnatural_ evil. With him gone it’s… cleaner. Purer. The Force doesn’t _hurt_ anymore.”

“The Jedi are gone, too.” Leia pointed out. Luke glared at her. “No, Luke, it needs to be said. There was corruption in that order. A lot of evil was left to fester because of the high road the Jedi took. When it was only Rey—the only one _using_ the Force, not like the pilots and sensitives—you felt it, too. It was _balanced_. It felt free.”

Luke sighed.

“It’s beautiful.” He agreed. “There’s not… it’s not a _struggle_. You can’t fall to either side if you’re really, truly, balanced. Tell me, Ben… what does the Force feel like for you, now?”

Rey crossed the room and held out a hand.

Ben mustered enough energy to take it.

“Like a new start.” He answered, throat harsh. “Like the answer to a question I’ve been searching for my whole life.”

Around him, his family shimmered out of existence, but that was okay.

His new family, tentative and alive, remained.

“I don’t care about all this eternally working for redemption shit,” Han Solo’s voice echoed from the afterlife, as the connection faded. “He’s my kid and I’m proud of him. Your spooky spooky council can…”

Rey met his eyes and burst into laughter, Finn’s head cocked to the side as if he could almost hear it, and Poe the fighter pilot looked around in confusion.

“What?” He asked. “What’d I miss?”

**Author's Note:**

> Basically more of what I said at the beginning note.
> 
> I'll probably come add stuff to this notes section but tbh I just want to post this while the high is still high.


End file.
